I installed Google Talk today. It provides an integrated interface for email, IM and phone. I can correlate the quality of this product to early Gmail days when I used to report atleast a bug a day to Gmail support.
As with Gmail conversation, Talk seems to maintain the entire thread as well. I tried sending a message to a friend who was away at that time, signed out of Talk and then logged back in again. When I tried sending message to that friend again, the earlier message was still available. I’m not sure how Talk is going to maintain message archive, sort them by date, month etc.. None of my friends in the same time zone have configured it yet so cant really comment upon the chatting experience.
Clicking on "Help" tries to open this link which gives a 404 in my browser window (aaargh!).
There is a "Connection Monitor" in the connection settings. This window can only be started from Settings -> Connection -> Start Monitor (not sure why?). It probably is meant to monitor network traffic but I did not see any updates in it when trying to send some bogus messages.
Talk crashed once without giving any clue about what happened and asked whether it’s ok to report to Google.
The cool thing is that Talk uses XMPP protocol and thus can be configured from GAIM (my chat client) or any other XMPP client. Here is the list of clients that an be used to connect to Talk. Another good feature in the planning is that Talk can be used to communicate with non-Gmail users. Could Google Talk possibly replace GAIM or other such clients is need to be seen ?
Here is a link from Google blog announcing Talk. Here is the article from 8/24 Mercury News.
And last but not the least, as with numerous other Google products (Gmail, News, Groups, etc), Talk is launched as a beta as well.
Technorati: topic:{technorati}[google+talk] topic:{technorati}[im] topic:{technorati}[Google] topic:{technorati}[Talk]
2008 – Hillary for President animation … http://www.grab.com/fun/toons/f/49651
Technorati: animation
Technorati: topic:{technorati}[dilbert] topic:{technorati}[manager] topic:{technorati}[comics]
via Paul Jakma
Technorati: topic:{technorati}[quiz]
Charitable organizations, political groups, organizations with which you have an established business relationship and companies that do not encourage the purchase, rental or investment in goods or services, such as those conducting a survey or seeking a donation or contribution are exempted from the Do Not Call restrictions. Here is the official list of exemptions. And I tend to fall victim to this mighty loophole almost 2-3 times a week. Sometimes local sheriff organization, phone survey, or even companies with whom I had a past business relationship tend to call up at my dinner time.
FTC and FCC launched this registry with a great intention but I wonder why they left these loopholes. I always ask the individual telemarketers to put me on their do not call list and that seems to have helped me reduce the spam calls further.
Technorati: topic:{technorati}[telephone+spam]
Survivor Guatemala – The Maya Empire, 11th episode of the show revealed it’s cast. Here are Yahoo! and Reality TV World reports. The video archive is available here.
Overall, 8 men (average age ~ 32) and 8 women (average age ~ 31) with a total crew of 16. Even though the average is slightly high but most of the players are in their early 20s. Here is an interesting analysis of the players age. There are only 2 players from California.
Mark Burnett has mentioned yet-to-be-revealed surprises in the first episode, which I hope will keep the game interesting. I would keep an eye on Jamie amongst the men and Lydia amongst the women. The season debuts on Thursday, Sep 15th, 8:00pm PT.
BTW, I like the new web design showing the cast details.
Technorati: topic:{technorati}[Survivor]
Technorati: topic:{technorati}[dilbert] topic:{technorati}[comics]
GMaps Pedometer is a great application of Google Maps that lets me track the lengths of my runs. It even lets me create a bookmark for the course and calculates the calories burned. I found this link in Cool Running forums.
In the recent years, I’ve been running 12-24 laps (depending upon what time I got up in the morning) in a school ground (0.27 miles). After a while I found it boring so switched to road running and ran either one or two laps (again dependent upon my early morning meetings) of this course (2.85 miles). But this route goes through a dog park and I end up dogs chasing me at multiple instances, aaargh! So switched back to my original route. Here is another route (3.5 miles) that I created this morning. I did on trial lap this morning and it was fun!
Technorati: topic:{technorati}[Running] topic:{technorati}[google+map] topic:{technorati}[Googlemaps] topic:{technorati}[pedometer] topic:{technorati}[gmap] topic:{technorati}[Google]
Space Adventures is selling tickets to moon for $100 million dollars. The trip might happen as early as 2008 and what I find interesting is that there are already a few potential clients interested in this mission.
Technorati: topic:{technorati}[space] topic:{technorati}[vacation]
And that’s because Survivor Guatemala premieres on that day. This will be my 9th consecutive season and I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the previous ones. Pearl Islands, All Stars and Palau are my favorite ones so far. Rupert is my all time favorite from the entire cast. You can expect to see a few survivor related entries in my blog once the season starts.
I like the buzz that two of the most hard fought but unlucky survivors from Survior Palau, Bobby Jon and Stephanie, are also participating in this season.
I’m ready to outwit, outplay and outlast my family for the season 
Technorati: topic:{technorati}[Survivor]
